


Guns in my head

by crimsonepitaph



Series: 2017 Writing Project [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean Winchester's mind is not a very happy place either, Exhaustion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 05:51:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10507587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crimsonepitaph/pseuds/crimsonepitaph
Summary: Sam and Dean feel the consequences of two weeks with almost no sleep. Part 1, Dean POV.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Author's note #1:** Title is from the lyrics in The Strumbrellas - Spirits.

He reads and re-reads the last paragraph. Discolored page of a lore book, some remnant of Bobby’s collection.  But his mind is blank. He can't remember anything he's read in the past hour. 

Nothing. There's nothing. 

Dean can't think, he doesn’t feel. He can’t summon the energy. 

Numbness. Hollowness fracturing, glass breaking from the inside.

It's excruciating. 

He doesn't know how Sam kept walking when Luci belted out _Stairway to Heaven_ one too many times. 

Dean feels like he's on the edge of a crevice, he's at the last moment before a fall – that never comes. No release.

He drums his fingers on the formica table. He stares at the flashing light on the other side of the window – a police car stopped behind a dirty white pickup. He drinks the last drops of soda from the paper cup sitting by his hand.

Ironically, alcohol lost its appeal after the first ten days on this hunt. It made Dean too sluggish, too sleepy. Too easy for his mind to allow cracks in the wall he’s been shoring up ever since he understood how to do that.

And the waiting has taken its own toll. Nights, days, 24/7, watching potential victims, staking out suspicious houses…

Finding two more bodies this morning - two more he didn’t save.

Dean is losing the battle with this case, and with himself. He wants to say something. To try and fight again. Maybe Sam –

…but Sam looks strong. Like this isn’t bothering him that much. All the crazy under one umbrella, at least, or something like that.   

And Dean wouldn’t know what to say.  No words seem to be worth sparing the energy. The jokes, the music, the verbal sparring matches with his brother – noise. That’s all it is right now.

Dean wills himself to focus. He balls his hands into fists, grasping the edge of the book. 

He reads the page again. 

But his mind travels – first to a cold, dank wendigo cave, then to the sucking mud of an abandoned town in South Dakota – to the claustrophobic heat of the room with the rack where Hell bellows, screams for him, pulls him to more memories that crawl under his skin.  

Somewhere inside, Dean lives.

And somewhere deeper, there is _Dean_.

The one who demands to be let out. The demon. The darkness. The thoughts that he doesn’t want to admit are his. There are shadows at the ends of his fingers, the ghosts of everyone he’s ever killed.

The stillness is not inside him. It's a room too small, and Dean is chained inside, and the room is getting smaller, and smaller...and Dean...Dean’s powerless.

Hopeless. 

Dean Winchester can’t fight for himself, not when it counts. 

And there's nothing to see, nothing on his face, only his hands remaining fisted, when Sam says,

"Dean? I got something."

He swallows _Dean’s_ shadow, pushes him down, tilts his head up to his brother.

He’ll keep going. It's not like Dean hasn't been running on empty for years now.


End file.
